Deconstructing the Idea of Beauty

1264 Words3 Pages

In her controversial bestseller Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf argues how culture’s images of beauty found on television, magazines, advertisements and pornography are detrimental to women. She exposes the unrealistic and impossible standards of female beauty that create insecurity and self hatred that can be easily exploited by glossy magazine pictures, fashion world, Hollywood, diets and plastic surgery industries. Wolf demonstrates that the concept of “beauty” is a created weapon that is used to make women feel badly about themselves because realistically not everyone can live up to the ideal template. Wolf’s argument is effective because through the use of persuasive and convincing language, she allows the reader to know the whole truth of how women are harmed in so many areas due to our culture selling women pointless products and pressuring them into striving for a certain narrow picture of beauty.

Naomi Wolf graduated from Yale University and did graduate work at Oxford University. She is an American author as well as a public speaker on social justice. Considering herself a liberal feminist, she has written a nation bestseller Beauty Myth, as well as other international bestselling books such as Promiscuities, Misconceptions and Fire with Fire. As well as being an author, she confounded the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership with a mission of education young women on how to be conscience driven leaders.

Working with young women has driven Naomi Wolf to reach out to women everywhere in her book, The Beauty Myth¸ in hopes that every woman in this world would stop letting the concept of the beauty myth distract them from realizing everything they are capable of. The intended audience of the book was women of all ages. As...

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... This chapter and the book overall were an enlightening look into our society’s expectations of beauty and the ideals that are placed on women. Wolf covers the idealization of beauty at every chance in order to show how it objectifies women. Even though some of her opinions and conclusions are unsupported and there is no clear concise view on how to tackle this ever -lasting problem, many women can understand the desire to fit in and find her writing meaningful and inspirational. She has an uncanny ability to connect to others as she does state, “I was grateful to have had the good luck to write a book that connected my own experience to that of women everywhere” (1). By going through similar experiences she wrote a book that promotes an image of self acceptance that goes further than clichés that control beauty.

Bibliography:

The Huffington Post

Beauty Myth

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